It’s January. Beware of the barrage of fad diets. After a few weeks of holiday indulgence, many people make a vow for a New Year’s resolution of dieting. Weight loss schemes abound to bribe you into buying pills, patches, and products. “Walk into my parlor,” said a spider to a fly. The deception of dieting is found […]

It’s Tuesday afternoon at two, which means Clarice Devon is on her way to the Curl Up ‘N Dye beauty salon. It’s like the sun coming up or the price of bread increasing. Tuesday. Two. Clarice. “Clarice!” yells Fran. “Ready to be beautiful?” “Sure,” she said. “I like attempting the impossible.” Clarice Devon is one […]

Incoming Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the former presidential candidate, has issued a sharp criticism of President Trump. “A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity,” he wrote, “and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect.”  Romney concluded that “president has not risen to the mantle of the office.” […]

Adjust. “They’ll make adjustments. They always do.” So said Donald Trump when a reporter asked him about the millions of people directly affected by his shutdown. Yes, millions. Nearly 400,000 federal workers are not being paid and an equal number of workers who were fulfilling government contracts are also not being paid. Most of those 800,000 […]

Gazing out an open sliding-glass door to my left, I can see only clear blue sky and greenish-gray river water.  The Suwanee River is well out of its banks, the flood waters lapping gently at the base of our house.  I don’t fear the flood invading the house, built on sturdy concrete stilts to offset […]

HART’S LOCATION, N.H. — “In our town, we like to know the facts about everybody.” The words were Thornton Wilder’s, they were written more than three-quarters of a century ago, and they can be found in the lines of “Our Town,” the quintessential New Hampshire drama — quintessential, that is, unless you are talking about […]

In the autumn of 1960, with the presidential race between Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy tightening, the Democratic Party candidate made much of a supposed “missile gap” that had emerged during the Eisenhower administration. Ike could have exposed the non-existent missile gap, but didn’t.In May 1960, Soviet air defenses downed […]

From the ground up, the prospect of publishing anything, such that people can read your book or purchase your novel, is daunting. We hear about literary success from the established and the vindicated, and place ourselves below their means or ability: we are the eyes to be skimming their countless pages. But publishing a piece of literature, […]

Greg Sargent recently wrote in the Washington Post: “For years after Deng Xiaoping’s decisive turn toward modernization in the late 1970s, U.S. business executives and diplomats supported not only opening the U.S. market to Chinese goods, but also a range of academic, cultural and even military contacts, on the theory that including China in a U.S.-led […]

According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, life expectancy in the United States is the longest ever, approaching 79 years. This was highlighted in a 2015 Time cover story, “This Baby Could Live to Be 142 Years Old.” With very few exceptions—such as the flu pandemic of 1918, which […]